More Pre-Grouping Wagons in 4mm - the D299 appreciation thread.

[Compound2632]

Penlan found a good shot here. 

 

http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/48792-tight-curves-in-a-ly-goods-yard/

 

I hadn't seen that photo before - thanks. Those L & Y van had canvas or tarpaulin covers I think - the LNW version was rather more robust, see my post et seq., including another overheard photo from Penlan. The photos show how the hatch was on one side only - in fact on the LNWR D32 the side door was on one side only too. Later L & Y vans had an A-frame construction with a central ridge beam, so there could be a hatch with a tarpaulin flap on both sides.

[John lewsey]

Hi would anyone happen to have a GWR V2 four wheeled brake coach that they would like to sell

Regards

John

[Londontram]

I thought you might like to see my take on the D32 van in fact this is the Caledonian pre diagram book goods van which is almost the same as the LNWR van with just detail differences in areas like the lower frame width etc. Both were drawn and cut on the Silhouette cutter so I can run off as many as I need/like and although its not clear on this picture the near complete one on the right is in the pre Drummond style with out side W irons and recessed end panels the left as yet unpainted one is a post Drummond modified design with flat ends with two anti burst stanchions and inside W irons.

 

I've already tweaked a set of drawings so the next one will be a D32 van

 

A close up of the single sided door and roof hatch on one of the vans 

[Penrhos1920]

. Both were drawn and cut on the Silhouette cutter so I can run off as many as I need/like and although its not clear on this picture the near complete one on the right is in the pre Drummond style with out side W irons and recessed end panels

That sounds like an offer to go into business!

[Compound2632]

I thought you might like to see my take on the D32 van in fact this is the Caledonian pre diagram book goods van which is almost the same as the LNWR van with just detail differences in areas like the lower frame width etc. Both were drawn and cut on the Silhouette cutter so I can run off as many as I need/like and although its not clear on this picture the near complete one on the right is in the pre Drummond style with out side W irons and recessed end panels the left as yet unpainted one is a post Drummond modified design with flat ends with two anti burst stanchions and inside W irons.

 

I like the flexibility the Silhouette is giving you to mass-produce wagons but no two the same. As I'm really a modeller of the Midland, I have the opposite challenge - many identical D299 5 plank opens! The outside W-irons are a nice touch - looking back at your thread I presume these are made on the Silhouette too, like the ones on your runner wagon and cask wagon? The W-irons don't need to be very strong if the axlebox - spring unit is rigidly fixed to the solebar. (I'm thinking of my method of Skrawking/sanding down the back of the W-irons on Slaters kits to something a bit nearer scale thickness; likewise, on the Ratio LNWR kits, the plastic W-irons are already quite thin.) Could you use plastic W-irons for all your wagons and save on buying commercial fold-up etched units?

 

Am I right in thinking that these Caledonian vans are shorter wheelbase than the LNWR one? Maybe 8' or 8'6" rather than 9'?

 

BTW I'm sure you have said on your thread, but what are you using for your red? I note Nile's use of Halford's red primer for Great Northern wagon red.

 

 

Hi would anyone happen to have a GWR V2 four wheeled brake coach that they would like to sell

Regards

John

 

This thread is for goods vehicles. I'm thinking of starting a new thread for passenger-rated stock, but this is unlikely to feature Great Western vehicles which are more than adequately catered for in the relevant 'special interests' section of RMWeb.

[Londontram]

Yes I use Halfords red primer as well but it will need toning down a bit with weathering after the transfers go on. The out side W irons are made in the same way as the other vans and after experimenting I found the most important thing is to get the inside width right for the axles your using in my case there standard Hornby spoked wagon wheels. Most kits and the silhouette cut wagons that need brass W irons fitting have a chassis rail inside width of 25mm this give room for the etched brass W iron (In my case Comet ones usual disclaimer) to sit within the chassis but on an out side W iron wagon there are no etched W irons the wheels being carried in top hat pin point bearings glued into the W iron direct. To get the right pre load on the axles I tweak the chassis rails so the inside width is 23.5mm this holds the axles in place with out putting undue strain on the plasticard W irons.

 

The silhouette is a handy tool but its no miracle worker and won't turn out complete kits ready to assemble but it will cut out the same shape again and again with out deviating so when I build the chassis for a standard etched W iron chassis I cut out four strips of 20 thou plasticard (The silhouette will not cut clean through 20 thou but will score about two thirds of the way through making it easy to "snap" or cut the part out)

 

So the chassis rails are made up from two sections of 20thou glued together making each rail 40thou and as said before these are set 25mm apart.

 

For the out side frame W iron chassis I use one section of 20th and two sections of 10thou plasticard these layers have the W iron drawn as part of the chassis rail. I do these in 10 thou as the cutter will cut clean through 10 thou which makes it easier to cut out the W iron shapes. When laminated together this gives the same width chassis rail as before of 40 thou. A final fret of the W iron alone is glued to the out side giving the 3D effect of the W iron but also making that part of the assembly 30thou thick so when dry very strong. When the glue is set I clamp both rails together and drill right through for the bearings so they line up. I use Wizard springs and axle boxes the springs glued behind the W iron again adding strength to the W iron These chassis rails are then set 23.5mm apart and when the chassis is dry the axles can be carefully eased into place there's usually just enough give.

 

Ive only had to do this once so far but if one of the axles is not quite square or sits to high or low you can elongate the bearing hole to allow the bearing to move before putting a dab of super glue on it'

 

As you say you can see the overall effect on this Dumb buffer runner wagon, the only items purchased being the wheel sets, springs and axle boxes though I'm working on drawing the springs in as part of the lower layers of the W iron if I can get an exceptable axle box it should leave just the wheels to buy.

[Compound2632]

Brilliant tutorial - thanks Londontram. I hadn't appreciated that there's an additional layer of plasticard behind the top W-iron piece but can see it now in your close-up. Lots of ideas here - looking through your thread I realise I'm trailing well behind not just in ingenuity but also in quantity! Once I have some more free time this summer I'll get cracking...

 

Re. Halfords red primer, I have used this on the Slaters rectangular tank wagon (report to follow in due course) and found it essential to spray with gloss varnish (Humbrol spray can) before applying the methfix transfers - in fact I've come round to believe I should be applying any type of transfers to a gloss surface. What type of transfers are you using for Caledonian wagons? If you are using the HMRS presfix or methfix ones, I hope you've overcome the traditional rivalries to do a deal with some North British and South Western modellers! All the Fox waterslide ones seem to be for locos and coaches.

[sharris]

Excellent models. The Silhouette certainly looks a welcome addition to the armoury.

 

For the outside W-iron examples I might have been tempted to make the axle boxes cosmetic and use MJT internal compensation units to support the axles.

[Compound2632]

Not much modelling just at present but a few evenings ago I did make up another set of 3-link couplings – good for another dozen wagons!

 

 

 These are a Slater’s product – one of a few 4 mm scale products still in their catalogue (Part No. 4151) though this batch are from a pack I found lurking in the back of a box and I think were bought twenty years ago. The links are of a softer wire than the last batch I made, which were from a recently-purchased packet! That certainly made assembly quicker than last time.

 

The hooks are a brass etching. This was polished up with Cif using an old electric toothbrush. After cutting from the fret and fettling, each hook was dunked in Carr’s metal black for brass (Part No. C1062). Once the couplings were assembled, the links were blackened by heating to a red heat in the flame of a gas ring and then quenching in oil (Tesco olive oil – other oils may be suitable). The coupling is held in a pair of pliers to avoid getting too close to the flame! When the end of the hook gets in the flame, green and blue flames are observed – chemistry students will recognise the characteristic colours for zinc and copper.

 

This is supposed to be a scratch- and kit-building thread; I have posted pictures of things I’ve merely bought but as I’ve posted a photo of my recently arrived batch of wagon sheets from Thomas Petith I’ll send you there.

 

 

Edited September 3, 2022 by Compound2632
image re-inserted

[Mikkel]

The 3-links look good, batch-making is clearly a good approach to this. I have been trying out the ready-made Smith's ones recently, but they're a bit large (although good for manual coupling no doubt).

[Compound2632]

The 3-links look good, batch-making is clearly a good approach to this. I have been trying out the ready-made Smith's ones recently, but they're a bit large (although good for manual coupling no doubt).

 

The Slater's ones look a lot better than the Smith's ones to my eyes but I confess coupling up is a challenge and I've been getting some stick at the Club for the time it takes to set a train up on the test track!

 

It helps to have something worth listening to on the radio while making these up.

[John lewsey]

The first D32 nearly done

[John lewsey]

Hi not a wagon I know but some of you that are interested in Pr Group railways may be interested in my LNWR workbench

[Compound2632]

image.jpeg Hi not a wagon I know but some of you that are interested in Pr Group railways may be interested in my LNWR workbench

 

Which is to be found here - there's some good-looking stuff.

[Compound2632]

This post ought really to be in the “Modifying & Detailing RTR stock” section…

 

Prompted by a recent thread on the degree or otherwise of faithfulness to the prototype of the various wooden-bodied private owner mineral wagons on offer from the RTR manufacturers, I thought it was time I got round to trying to remedy the defects of the Hornby 6/4/3-plank wagons. These wagons are in many ways a great step forward from the run of hideous 10-foot wheelbase steel framed monstrosities that go back to the days of Mainline and Airfix in the 1970s. Bachmann, and more recently Oxford, have given us good representations of the RCH 1923 specification 12 ton wagons – almost up to the quality of the Parkside kits, which are among their very best. However, the prototype fidelity of the basic model has not been followed through in the choice of livery. The PO wagon books have been pillaged for appealing liveries irrespective of whether they were actually applied to RCH 1923 wagons, with the resulting absurdity of wagons marked “Load 10 Tons” or “Return to” some pre-grouping destination. The Hornby wagons have the virtue of representing earlier designs – they have the look of pre-RCH 1907 specification wagons about them. I have a number of these wagons. The 6-plank wagon in the livery of J. Hackett & Co, Birmingham, seemed an appropriate one to start hacking away at:

 

 

Standing next to a Slaters/POWsides kit-built Gloucester C&W Co. 5-plank wagon, the basic all-rightness of the Hornby wagon is evident – in fact it has a Gloucester-ish air itself. The gross Triang-esque couplings screwed into solid pillars descending from the headstock are bizarre for a model introduced in the last ten years or so. The wagon does look to ride a little high – buffer centres are a scale 3’7” above rail level where 3’4” – 3’5” would be more prototypical. Below the solebar, things look a bit more cluttered than on the Slaters wagon, though double-sided brake gear contributes to this. Bout otherwise, it’s pretty passable. Replacing the couplings with something a little finer – using the Parkside NEM sockets for example – would be a simple first step. But the closer one looks the more one realises that there’s a good deal of tromp l’oeil going on…

 

 

… around the V-hanger and brake lever. What works at a square-on glance is exposed as a piece of fakery – in order to make the brake lever an integral part of the one-piece underframe moulding, it’s solid behind to a depth of about 6 mm. As for the V-hanger… Looking very closely, the lower part of the siderail is recessed by 0.5 mm so there’s an unprototypical step. What I find really curious is that whoever designed this model had a good idea of how a real wagon works – there’s a basic representation of the cross, longitudinal, and diagonal frame members and the drawgear.

This next shot emphasises the positive points:

 

 

The printing of the livery is superb: Empty to Madeley & Leycett Coll ^Ltd. Madeley L&NWR^y. to Load ---- ----- (not quite legible – but I suspect specifying the type of coal). to Tare 5-2-0. – a bit garbled but probably true to the prototype. (At this point I have to confess that I haven’t seen the photo on which the livery is based, though I assume it is Plate 69 in Keith Turton’s Private Owner Wagons: a Ninth Collection, per the reference in the Lightmoor online index, so I’m in the dark about the authenticity of this livery on this wagon – so much for my snooty remarks about the Bachmann and Oxford liveries…) This wagon can run in my LNWR train: Madeley & Leycett Colliery was a few miles west of Stoke-on-Trent and was connected to the LNWR main line at Madeley by what seems to have been one of the very earliest colliery lines, opening in 1839 when the main line was still the Grand Junction Railway. It was the scene of a series of underground explosions in the 1880s, in the worst of which 62 miners were killed.  The diamond plate on the solebar reads: 1884 MADE CONVERTED 10 TONS 1906 – the conversion might be from dumb buffers and/or might involve new journals increasing the load from (perhaps) 8 tons to 10 tons. The horseshoe-shaped builder’s plate reads: THOMAS BURNETT & C^O L^TD DONCASTER and in the middle: CONVERTED BY. (The Chasewater Railway Museum has a similar plate, but with the central wording: FOR REPAIRS ADVISE. I’ve not come acros this fir before – were they solely wagon repairers rather than builders? ) Only the registration plate isn’t printed, though it’s moulded on the solebar just to the right of the V-hanger. Should the body ironwork be black along with the corner-plates?  The main downside on livery, common to all the 6/4/3-plank wagons that share this underframe, is that the headstocks are unpainted black plastic rather than body colour. The round-bottomed grease axleboxes are spot-on and the springs and shoes are nicely done, as are the axleguards – though of course these are over-thick (about 1 mm). The brake-blocks are in line with the wheels and the push-rods have some nice detail – just a shame they’re obscured by the V-hanger and brake lever moulding.

 

How to remedy these defects? Quarryscapes has suggested replacing the underframe with the Cambrian Models Gloucester underframe. This would be a straightforward solution but (a) the Cambrian underframe has the later square-bottomed Gloucester grease axleboxes, so one would lose that pre-RCH 1907 look and (b) one would lose those superbly-printed solebar plates. I started out with the hope that I could carve off the monstrous brake lever and V-hanger (along with the brake gear on one side) leaving the nice axleguard/axlebox mouldings intact. It became clear that I wasn’t going to end up with a very neat job where the brake lever passes in front of the axleguard (and I accidentally snapped one axleguard/axlebox moulding off). So in the end I cut away everything leaving just the solebars and headstocks:

 

 

The replacement running gear is from MJT – their whitemetal Attock’s grease axleboxes and springs (item 2247) and etched RCH/GWR W irons (item 2299 – comes with an interesting selection of keeper plates and solebar ironwork…). Quite a lot of plastic has been scraped away from the insides of the solebars to thin them down to about prototype thickness, so that the MJT units fit.

 

Here’s a trial assembly – nothing soldered or glued yet – alongside the Slaters wagon:

 

 

It still looks to be riding high – some fettling of the whitemetal parts is needed – but it’s a good deal airier down below – helped by the Gibson wheels.

To be continued…

 

 

Edited August 26, 2022 by Compound2632
Images re-inserted

[BG John]

I was quite impressed with the Hornby 4 plank, in the middle, with Slaters on the right, and Bachmann on the left. All I've done so far is remove the couplings, and slide the wheels out to EM gauge. I think it was a good buy. The Bachmann was on special offer at Gaugemaster when I placed an order that was too small for free postage, so at a low price, and avoiding having to pay the handling charge, wasn't a bad price for something that needs a fair bit of work to backdate. It's a shame the fine brake gear on the Bachmann isn't on the Hornby!

 

 

[phil_sutters]

It still looks to be riding high – some fettling of the whitemetal parts is needed – but it’s a good deal airier down below – helped by the Gibson wheels.

To be continued…

 

Nice work upgrading r-t-r stock  I wonder if the 'high ride' may be in part due to the depth of the solebars. Compared with its neighbour that dimension looks greater. There seems to be a bigger gap above the iron fittings. This appearance may be due to the lighter colour of the woodwork.

Edited June 11, 2017 by phil_sutters

[Compound2632]

 

I was quite impressed with the Hornby 4 plank, in the middle, with Slaters on the right, and Bachmann on the left. All I've done so far is remove the couplings, and slide the wheels out to EM gauge. I think it was a good buy. The Bachmann was on special offer at Gaugemaster when I placed an order that was too small for free postage, so at a low price, and avoiding having to pay the handling charge, wasn't a bad price for something that needs a fair bit of work to backdate. It's a shame the fine brake gear on the Bachmann isn't on the Hornby!

 

 

Your post illustrates my points admirably - the side-on view of the Hornby wagon hides the grossness of the brake lever and the dodge with the V-hanger. If you can live with those in a 'layout wagon' then the only thing further you need do is cut away the coupling mounting. However, one consideration that led me to cutting away all the interior moulding was having enough space to fit the sprung hook of the Slaters 3-link couplings I use. I see that for EM, the brakes are now behind the line of the wheels!

 

The Bachmann wagon illustrates my point about inappropriate liveries - here's a 16'6"-long RCH 1923 12 ton wagon branded "Load 8 tons" - so your first task in backdating it will be to shorten the body by a good 4 mm! (Without damaging the livery...)

 

I'll admit to being a hypocrite - I've about 40 Bachmann 12 tonners in all sorts of liveries that make up two mineral trains behind Bachmann 4Fs, 3Fs, and a G2 on my allegedly 1950s layout...  

Nice work upgrading r-t-r stock  I wonder if the 'high ride' may be in part due to the depth of the solebars. Compared with its neighbour that dimension looks greater. There seems to be a bigger gap above the iron fittings. This appearance may be due to the lighter colour of the woodwork.

 

It's mostly down to the fact that its not stuck together yet!

[BG John]

Your post illustrates my points admirably - the side-on view of the Hornby wagon hides the grossness of the brake lever and the dodge with the V-hanger. If you can live with those in a 'layout wagon' then the only thing further you need do is cut away the coupling mounting. However, one consideration that led me to cutting away all the interior moulding was having enough space to fit the sprung hook of the Slaters 3-link couplings I use. I see that for EM, the brakes are now behind the line of the wheels!

 

The Bachmann wagon illustrates my point about inappropriate liveries - here's a 16'6"-long RCH 1923 12 ton wagon branded "Load 8 tons" - so your first task in backdating it will be to shorten the body by a good 4 mm! (Without damaging the livery...)

 

I'll admit to being a hypocrite - I've about 40 Bachmann 12 tonners in all sorts of liveries that make up two mineral trains behind Bachmann 4Fs, 3Fs, and a G2 on my allegedly 1950s layout... 

I'll probably be fitting Spratt & Winkle couplings. I'm inclined to leave the wagons more or less as they are for now, but will probably remove the brakes on one side. That's a nice simple way to deal with the brake problem, as long as I run them with the unbraked side to the front of the layout . If I manage to not damage the spring and W-iron too much!

 

The Bachmann wagon probably wouldn't have found its way to the West Country, so a change of livery would be needed anyway, when I start hacking it about!

 

Now I just need a working layout to run them on. I'll find out how close that is when I test the electronics I've been soldering up!

[wagonman]

This post ought really to be in the “Modifying & Detailing RTR stock” section…

 

Prompted by a recent thread on the degree or otherwise of faithfulness to the prototype of the various wooden-bodied private owner mineral wagons on offer from the RTR manufacturers, I thought it was time I got round to trying to remedy the defects of the Hornby 6/4/3-plank wagons. These wagons are in many ways a great step forward from the run of hideous 10-foot wheelbase steel framed monstrosities that go back to the days of Mainline and Airfix in the 1970s. Bachmann, and more recently Oxford, have given us good representations of the RCH 1923 specification 12 ton wagons – almost up to the quality of the Parkside kits, which are among their very best. However, the prototype fidelity of the basic model has not been followed through in the choice of livery. The PO wagon books have been pillaged for appealing liveries irrespective of whether they were actually applied to RCH 1923 wagons, with the resulting absurdity of wagons marked “Load 10 Tons” or “Return to” some pre-grouping destination. The Hornby wagons have the virtue of representing earlier designs – they have the look of pre-RCH 1907 specification wagons about them. I have a number of these wagons. The 6-plank wagon in the livery of J. Hackett & Co, Birmingham, seemed an appropriate one to start hacking away at:

 

Hornby Hackett 1.JPG

 

Standing next to a Slaters/POWsides kit-built Gloucester C&W Co. 5-plank wagon, the basic all-rightness of the Hornby wagon is evident – in fact it has a Gloucester-ish air itself. The gross Triang-esque couplings screwed into solid pillars descending from the headstock are bizarre for a model introduced in the last ten years or so. The wagon does look to ride a little high – buffer centres are a scale 3’7” above rail level where 3’4” – 3’5” would be more prototypical. Below the solebar, things look a bit more cluttered than on the Slaters wagon, though double-sided brake gear contributes to this. Bout otherwise, it’s pretty passable. Replacing the couplings with something a little finer – using the Parkside NEM sockets for example – would be a simple first step. But the closer one looks the more one realises that there’s a good deal of tromp l’oeil going on…

 

Hornby Hackett 3.JPG

 

… around the V-hanger and brake lever. What works at a square-on glance is exposed as a piece of fakery – in order to make the brake lever an integral part of the one-piece underframe moulding, it’s solid behind to a depth of about 6 mm. As for the V-hanger… Looking very closely, the lower part of the siderail is recessed by 0.5 mm so there’s an unprototypical step. What I find really curious is that whoever designed this model had a good idea of how a real wagon works – there’s a basic representation of the cross, longitudinal, and diagonal frame members and the drawgear.

This next shot emphasises the positive points:

 

Hornby Hackett 2.JPG

 

The printing of the livery is superb: Empty to Madeley & Leycett Coll ^Ltd. Madeley L&NWR^y. to Load ---- ----- (not quite legible – but I suspect specifying the type of coal). to Tare 5-2-0. – a bit garbled but probably true to the prototype. (At this point I have to confess that I haven’t seen the photo on which the livery is based, though I assume it is Plate 69 in Keith Turton’s Private Owner Wagons: a Ninth Collection, per the reference in the Lightmoor online index, so I’m in the dark about the authenticity of this livery on this wagon – so much for my snooty remarks about the Bachmann and Oxford liveries…) This wagon can run in my LNWR train: Madeley & Leycett Colliery was a few miles west of Stoke-on-Trent and was connected to the LNWR main line at Madeley by what seems to have been one of the very earliest colliery lines, opening in 1839 when the main line was still the Grand Junction Railway. It was the scene of a series of underground explosions in the 1880s, in the worst of which 62 miners were killed.  The diamond plate on the solebar reads: 1884 MADE CONVERTED 10 TONS 1906 – the conversion might be from dumb buffers and/or might involve new journals increasing the load from (perhaps) 8 tons to 10 tons. The horseshoe-shaped builder’s plate reads: THOMAS BURNETT & C^O L^TD DONCASTER and in the middle: CONVERTED BY. (The Chasewater Railway Museum has a similar plate, but with the central wording: FOR REPAIRS ADVISE. I’ve not come acros this fir before – were they solely wagon repairers rather than builders? ) Only the registration plate isn’t printed, though it’s moulded on the solebar just to the right of the V-hanger. Should the body ironwork be black along with the corner-plates?  The main downside on livery, common to all the 6/4/3-plank wagons that share this underframe, is that the headstocks are unpainted black plastic rather than body colour. The round-bottomed grease axleboxes are spot-on and the springs and shoes are nicely done, as are the axleguards – though of course these are over-thick (about 1 mm). The brake-blocks are in line with the wheels and the push-rods have some nice detail – just a shame they’re obscured by the V-hanger and brake lever moulding.

 

How to remedy these defects? Quarryscapes has suggested replacing the underframe with the Cambrian Models Gloucester underframe. This would be a straightforward solution but (a) the Cambrian underframe has the later square-bottomed Gloucester grease axleboxes, so one would lose that pre-RCH 1907 look and (b) one would lose those superbly-printed solebar plates. I started out with the hope that I could carve off the monstrous brake lever and V-hanger (along with the brake gear on one side) leaving the nice axleguard/axlebox mouldings intact. It became clear that I wasn’t going to end up with a very neat job where the brake lever passes in front of the axleguard (and I accidentally snapped one axleguard/axlebox moulding off). So in the end I cut away everything leaving just the solebars and headstocks:

 

Hornby Hackett 4.JPG

 

The replacement running gear is from MJT – their whitemetal Attock’s grease axleboxes and springs (item 2247) and etched RCH/GWR W irons (item 2299 – comes with an interesting selection of keeper plates and solebar ironwork…). Quite a lot of plastic has been scraped away from the insides of the solebars to thin them down to about prototype thickness, so that the MJT units fit.

 

Here’s a trial assembly – nothing soldered or glued yet – alongside the Slaters wagon:

 

Hornby Hackett 5.JPG

 

It still looks to be riding high – some fettling of the whitemetal parts is needed – but it’s a good deal airier down below – helped by the Gibson wheels.

To be continued…

 

 

 

Thomas Burnett & Co were indeed builders as well as repairers. I think I have a photo or two somewhere...

[Mikkel]

Great to see you do justice to the newer Hornby P.O.s, I've often thought they were unfairly ignored by many of us. Looks like a very effective and do-able conversion job.

 

What will you be using for brake gear? Left overs from Slater's kits maybe? 

[Compound2632]

Another of my Hornby 6-plank wagons is in the livery of C & G Ayres, the well-known and still extant Reading firm now principally in the removals business but at one time a major coal merchant as well. There have been various RTR C & G Ayres wagons, including versions by Replica Railways (10’ w/b steel underframe), Robbies Rolling Stock in both 7-plank and 5-plank versions (10’ w/b steel u/f again, using Dapol wagons), Mitch Stepanovich in N (7-plank 10’ w/b steel u/f Farish? wagon) and in retro tinplate O-gauge by ETS. My Hornby version came in a 3-wagon ‘weathered’ pack.

 

I’ve tried the basic modification of removing the couplings and cutting off the coupling mounting blocks just to see how much of an improvement that gives:

 

 

The Lightmoor online index lists half-a-dozen reproductions of Ayres wagons in the PO wagon literature; presumably some of these are duplicates since the Replica and Stepanovich wagons carry No. 530, The Robbies 7-plank, 293, and the Robbies 5-plank and ETS wagons, like this Hornby model, 400, while the ‘pristine’ Hornby version, available as a single wagon, is 406. The wagon from which the Hornby livery is copied (says he, choosing his words carefully) was built by and on hire from the Birmingham Carriage & Wagon Co., as evidenced by their plate, which is superbly printed:

 

 

This gives their fleet number 26866 – unfortunately the same as that borne by the model of Ayres’ No. 406… The top line of  the rectangular plate on the solebar reads FOR REPAIRS ADVISE – unfortunately this is printed over the moulded registration plate. There is a printed registration plate at the left hand end of the solebar but it’s not quite legible. The plate underneath the G of C & G AYRES reads LOAD 10 TONS.

 

I’ll be getting the knife out on the running gear shortly. I’ve featured this Birmingham C & W Co. wagon as thanks to wagonman for his many valuable posts based on his research into the wagon archives. Today’s choice of yard shunter is dedicated to Edwardian. On that never-never day when I finally go P4, No. 1 will be first in line for the finescale treatment.

 

On 12/06/2017 at 00:41, Mikkel said:

Great to see you do justice to the newer Hornby P.O.s, I've often thought they were unfairly ignored by many of us. Looks like a very effective and do-able conversion job.

 

What will you be using for brake gear? Left overs from Slater's kits maybe? 

 

Mikkel, brake gear will indeed be left-over Slaters. One advantage of ‘Edwardian Image’ modelling (hereafter EI) is that with all these single-sided brake wagons, there’s no shortage of spare brake gear parts!

Edited August 26, 2022 by Compound2632
Images re-inserted

[BG John]

Seeing the difference in buffer heights, it's no wonder that Thomas has that look on his face. That's one very troublesome truck!

[Mikkel]

Another interesting project, Compound.

 

Can I ask if your sources have any details on the dates of C & G Ayres liveries? I ask because I have one of the Powsides kits, which has red sides - whereas all the RTR models seem to show the green livery featured on your wagon. I wonder if the red livery preceded the green livery, as the company's green livery seems to be remembered today. Or have Powsides got it wrong...

 

The company´s own site does not give any clues (but shows a nice horsedrawn van which could be modelled by modifying the Langley parcels van kit, but I digress).

[wagonbasher]

Another interesting project, Compound.

 

Can I ask if your sources have any details on the dates of C & G Ayres liveries? I ask because I have one of the Powsides kits, which has red sides - whereas all the RTR models seem to show the green livery featured on your wagon. I wonder if the red livery preceded the green livery, as the company's green livery seems to be remembered today. Or have Powsides got it wrong...

 

The company´s own site does not give any clues (but shows a nice horsedrawn van which could be modelled by modifying the Langley parcels van kit, but I digress).

I have two and maybe three Cambrian kits (7 plank I think) that are pre printed with this Ayres livery I bought them second hand and to be honest they are likely to be over painted and a more regional livery to me will be applied.

 

Andy